I finally got around to getting (most of) my favourite, day-to-day software
installed, so my Gentoo install is usable. It took 30 minutes to emerge
Firefox (not counting its dependencies), but I haven't seen Firefox this fast
in years! Almost everything else I use is terminal-based so I haven't noticed
as much of a difference, but I think my emacs daemon starts faster, too. My
kernel is genkernel-3.8.13 stock, modified only for Radeon support.

Thanks to USE flags, I've avoided installing tonnes of features I'd never use.
I didn't even know emacs could be compiled without X support, and I've been
using it exclusively in terminal mode for at least the past two years!

So: Thanks to all the devs who've created Gentoo Linux!_________________github

Yeah i really like portage. For me its important that you can do multiple emerges simultaneously. At leat APT cant do multiple installs simultaneously.

Neither can Arch's pacman. I suppose when you're dealing with binary packages it's not as important because you're typically not waiting very long for any given installation.

these are great examples of the total elegance of portage/gentoo. I moved from arch years ago. because I had lots of new hardware and to get it work required using alot of git or svn packages. Which is fine but when i needed to update them I had manually remember and upgrade all my dev package 1 by 1 FFS.

So staying with Gentoo is a no brainer_________________If it's a Placebo, You can Believe in it !!

APT doesn't have sane merge behaviour either. I remember trying an Ubuntu install on Btrfs a year or two ago and the machine pretty much became unusable during any package operation. Installing Gentoo was actually faster *including* the compile times!

Neither can Arch's pacman. I suppose when you're dealing with binary packages it's not as important because you're typically not waiting very long for any given installation.

I was somewhat shocked to find I could only do one pacman at a time. Especially when setting it up. It'd be ideal to continue working your way through the wiki while some of the bigger packages are doing their thing in the background._________________Neo wasn't searching for the matrix.. he was doing an overnight emerge
Reiser is a killer filesystem.

Running emerge in parallel may have drawbacks though AFAIK, because emerge calculates the merge list before doing anything, so if you were to emerge two different packages at once that require some library that is not installed, you'd be emerging that library twice. And if one of the emerges unmerges some library version in the process that may be required by the other one, that may lead to an error.
This all is theoretical, I've never attempted to test such a thing.

Most binary package managers protect you form such stuff hapening, so that's why they lock their database IIRC.